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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.71: The Democratic Conference

Before we get going this week, I want to reiterate the special book tour announcement I dropped a couple of days ago, which I hope everybody listened to. In fact, by the time you’re listening to this, I will probably be on my way to Minneapolis to start a little signing tour through the upper Midwest. On Monday, October 11, from 4 to 6:00 PM. I will be in Minneapolis at Magers and Quinn. On Tuesday, October 12th, from 6 to 8:00 PM, I will be with Anderson’s Bookshop at Community Christian Church for a driveby signing event in Naperville. That again is Naperville, which in my regional ignorance, I casually implied was a Chicago event, but then absolutely got roasted on Twitter for implying that Naperville was Chicago — Naperville is not Chicago, lesson learned — but anyway, on Tuesday, October 12th, I will be in Naperville. Then on Wednesday, October 13, from 2 to 4:00 PM, I will be at Kismet Books in Verona, Wisconsin, which is an awesome little bookstore just south of Madison. Finally, Thursday, October 14, from 4 to 6:00 PM, I will be back at Boswell’s in Milwaukee. I look forward to this being the first of many more live events as everybody gets vaccinated and we get to move back towards a new normal. Links to info about all of these events are included in the show notes and at the website revolutionspodcast.com, or you can follow me on Twitter. There are some RSVP and ticket requirements for some of these events so please do go to the event page and do what they tell you you need to do in order to attend.

Now, speaking of these being the first of many more live events, I can actually now officially plug what the next live event is going to be: I will be doing a one-off event in Pasadena, California with Romans and book Soup on October 27th, so if you are in the LA area, you are officially notified that I will be doing a book event in Pasadena on October 27. This one will be a full book talk and signing, so it’ll be a full evening of Mike Duncan. The space itself will be socially distanced, masks will be worn, and proof of vaccination will be required to attend. I am really looking forward to that, I really do love doing these things, and I very much look forward to getting to do many more of them in the future. So, see you in Minneapolis, Naperville, Verona, or Milwaukee this week, or October 27 in Pasadena, or in the future, all the other places I hope to come to.

But getting back to it, last time we covered the Kornilov Affair, one of the great turning points of 1917. And it was a great turning point for incredibly ironic reasons. General Kornilov’s principle motivation for declaring a military dictatorship was fear of a Bolshevik insurrection, and more than anything else, his own attempt to impose that military dictatorship is what made the Bolshevik seizure of power possible. Alexander Kerensky, who was absolutely up to his eyeballs in blame for the Kornilov Affair, said later, August 27 is what made October 27 possible.

The Bolsheviks certainly recognized the massive gift they had been given, and they made the most of it, as we will spend a great deal of today discussing. But I don’t want to lose sight of Kornilov’s other stated objective, which he explicitly laid out in his declaration on August 20. He said: “I General Kornilov, the son of a Cossack peasant, declare to each and all that I personally desire nothing but to save great Russia. I swear to lead the people through victory over the enemy to the constituent assembly, where it will decide its own destiny and choose its new political system.”

Because we cannot forget that the constituent assembly is still a thing. Now, given the ultimate result of the Revolution of 1917, it is hard to remember that from the moment Tsar Nicholas abdicated the throne in favor of Grand Duke Mikhail, the constituent assembly was meant to be the great political result of the revolution. As everyone no doubt remembers, when Grand Duke Mikhail declined the throne, he didn’t just decline the throne for all time, he said, I will become tsar only if and when a constituent assembly meets and offers me the throne. Then, he signed over power to the self-appointed provisional government on the understanding that one of their principle tasks was organizing and convening that constituent assembly. It’s why they were the provisional government. They were provisional. They were meant to be a temporary placeholder who derive their legitimacy from two directions; one running from the past to the present — that is, the chain of sovereign custody passing from Nicholas to Mikhail, and then immediately from Mihail to the provisional government — but also another source of legitimacy running backwards from the future to the present — which is to say, that one of the main sources of their legitimacy was looking forward to the fact that they would be the ones to convene a constituent assembly.

But that was all back in the first week of March, and here we are heading into September and the constituent assembly has still not been convened. And as we have seen over the past few episodes, the chain of sovereign custody has been run through multiple political blenders. The first government Mihail passed power to collapsed after eight weeks, the second government — the first coalition government of socialists and liberals — was created after negotiations with the leaders of the Petrograd Soviet, who had no legal, constitutional authority to speak of. That second government then collapsed leading into and out of the July days and everything had to get reshuffled again, producing a third government, the third government since February, and more than ever, a government that was simply the improvised result of negotiations with non constitutional actors: heads of political parties, the essentially self appointed leaders of the Soviet. Decisions were being made by an incredibly small group of leading Kadets, SRs and Mensheviks. And in fact, one of the main driving thrusts of the July Days was that by now the provisional government no longer had anything resembling political legitimacy, and the Soviet, which at least kind of did, just needed to take over. In terms of connecting the dots between February and October, the failure of the various provisional governments to move quickly towards a nationally elected constituent assembly is usually overshadowed by other factors, and not without good reason, but it is a major factor.

This mistake though, brings us back to the impact of the June Offensive, which also continues to loom very large as a dot connecting February to October. Because even though the failure to move quickly towards a constituent assembly was to a certain degree just not acting with any kind of urgency in getting bogged down in trifling minutia, but there was also an unstated assumption that the constituent assembly would meet after the war was over… or at least after Russia’s military position was so unassailable and secure that it would be safe to do something as momentously unprecedented as convening a national assembly, to write a new constitution for Russia. The expectation among the ministers and functionaries of these various provisional government was that the war had been a rolling debacle due entirely to the incompetence of Nicholas and Alexandra. Now that they were out of the way, the tide would surely turn.

So all through March, April, May, and June, none of them felt any great rush to hold the constituent assembly because they assumed it would be held after victory on the battlefield. And they also assumed that said victory was probably right around the corner. But then the June Offensive turned into the June and July Retreat, and the military situation went from bad to worse. So now the provisional government was caught out in no man’s land. They couldn’t keep putting off the constituent assembly until victory or peace because victory and peace were not going to be coming anytime soon. But they also were now very worried about going ahead with it because the resulting political crisis caused by the failure of the June Offensive might not be full of moderate liberal statesmen writing an orderly constitution, but angry radicals looking to turn the world upside down. But they also couldn’t put off the constituent assembly much longer because as I said, the last remaining shreds of the government’s legitimacy was still tied to the expectation that they would convene a constituent assembly. So after very, nearly being overthrown in the July Days, the provisional government started making announcements. On July 20th, they announced the electoral procedures and rules for suffrage, including the right of women both to vote and stand for election to the constituent assembly, a major victory for the feminist groups who had been so instrumental in launching the February Revolution in the first place. Then, in the second week of August, the government announced that elections would be held November 12th, and the first session of the constituent assembly would meet November 28th.

Now, this was still three very long months away, but it was officially on the calendar. And the fact that the constituent assembly was slated to meet in November was part of the reason Kornilov and Kerensky conspired to declare martial law in August. They both believed that a period of military rule might be necessary to allow the constituent assembly to meet in peace. Then once the assembly met and drafted a new constitution for Russia, military rule could be dialed back, and a new civilian government enjoying the sovereign legitimacy granted to it by this constituent assembly could come to power.

But if this is what they were trying to accomplish, the Kornilov Affair was a debacle. It was a complete failure. It left the government with almost no legitimacy to speak of. Alexander Kerensky successfully double-crossed Kornilov and induce the mass resignation of the ministry and the transfer of all executive authority into his hands, but it left him exactly nowhere. And I’m not sure I’ve actually seen a dictatorship held with such a narrow base of power. The only person I’ve written about who immediately springs to mind is Didius Julianus from the old History of Rome days. He’s the senator who was proclaimed emperor by the Praetorian Guard after winning a literal bidding war for their services after they had assassinated Emperor Pertinax. Didius Julianus was of course immediately overthrown by Septimius Severus who commanded the support of, y’know, armies and entire provinces.

In the first days of September, 1917, Kerensky was all powerful, at least on paper. He appointed a handful of ministers to lead the key ministries of state, and then they spent the next several weeks ruling by executive fiat. He spent these weeks attempting to find something, anything, anyone who would give his government even the veneer of legitimacy, but the Kornilov Affair simultaneously left Kerensky as an all-powerful dictator, but also a friendless non-entity. Each for their own reasons, neither the left nor the right, now trusted him. The officer corps of the army hated Kerensky for betraying Kornilov. The rank and file of the military hated him for conspiring with Kornilov. The question at this point was whether Kerensky, who almost nobody liked trusted or listened to anymore, could survive until the constituent assembly in November. And the answer was: no, he could not.

As we discussed last week, the main beneficiaries of the Kornilov Affair were. Ironically the very Bolshevik Party Kornilov had been trying to crush. The Bolsheviks, as we also discussed last week, had managed to escape through July and August without being completely crushed because the Mensheviks and the SRs who led the Soviet, as well as prime minister, Kerensky himself, were so worried about the threat of a counter-revolutionary coup from the right that they did not want to have any enemies to their left, especially an enemy as militant and well-armed and aggressive as the Bolsheviks were. The Kornilov Affair completed the political rehabilitation of the Bolsheviks, who were now seen as the most ardent and clear-eyed defenders of the revolution. In the scramble to defend Petrograd from the forces of counterrevolution everyone had turned to the Bolsheviks to provide both generals and foot soldiers, and they delivered. Even if no fighting actually took place, the Bolsheviks were now considered the saviors of Petrograd.

Now from the very beginning, going all the way back to the original split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, and then all through the Revolution of 1905, the Bolsheviks had always been the minority party. In February 1917, they probably counted no more than a few hundred active party members. But from that small nucleus, they had been growing. As we talked about in the episode on the July Days, they did very well among the sailors of the Kronstadt Naval Base, the workers in the Vyborg District, and major parts of the Petrograd Garrison, particularly those machine gunners. By the summer of 1917, the Bolsheviks counted as many as 200,000 members across Russia. They were still not as big as the SRs, but this was absolutely nothing to sneeze at. And the Bolsheviks, as we’ve also discussed, now also benefited from the very things that had once made them such a minority party: they were the party associated with being opposed to the war. Now this had made them unpopular during periods when the war was popular, but now that the war was unpopular, it made them very, very popular. They were also the party who were most clearly and consistently in favor of the slogan, all power to the Soviets, because as the legitimacy of the provisional government just disappeared into nothingness, the Soviet as an institution and as an idea still had a lot of legitimacy in the minds of workers and sailors and soldiers, and the Bolsheviks had been the ones running around out there saying, the provisional government is illegitimate, the Soviet is legitimate, so let’s transfer all power to the Soviet. As the months went by, disillusionment with the Mensheviks and SR leadership of the Soviets drove many former supporters into the waiting ranks of the Bolsheviks. The Kornilov Affair rapidly accelerated those defections as the ongoing support from the Soviet leadership for Kerensky, his government, and the liberals was increasingly incomprehensible to people in the streets and factories and garrisons of Russia. The Bolshevik started to really gain electoral ground in municipal elections, culminating with their surprise victory in the local Moscow elections. In September of 1917. They also gained major ground in local Soviets out in the provinces, especially in industrial areas, and by September 1917, there were close to a dozen major provincial Soviets whose executive councils were dominated by Bolshevik Party members.

Now more than anything else, however, the story of politics by the fall of 1917 was less a story of rising democratic support for the Bolsheviks — which wasn’t really the case — but rather the mass proliferation of disillusionment and apathy. The huge initial burst of enthusiasm and energy in February 1917 had ultimately produced meager results. Not only did the war continue, but it continued to be defined by bloodshed and defeat. Workers were encouraged to cooperate with their bosses in the interests of keeping industry going rather than taking over industry for themselves. Out in the rural areas, peasants were seizing land, and instead of being encouraged and validated, the government was handing down proclamations telling them to knock it off. The Mensheviks and SR leaders of the Soviet continued to insist on supporting coalition government with capitalists and landowners, like, at all costs. The once raucus and excited general assemblies of the Petrograd Soviet had long since ceased meeting with any regularity. They gave way to insulated and semi-secretive committees and bureaucratic directories who were happy to speak for the people, but no longer really interested in speaking with the people. And so the people simply stopped showing up. And people stopped voting. People kind of stopped caring. It was becoming very much meet the new boss, same as the old boss, so like in those municipal elections I just talked about, yes, the Bolsheviks grew their share of the vote, but it was a larger share of a much smaller pie. Local Petrograd elections held in August, saw voter turnout decrease 30% from the spring. In Moscow, the election where the Bolsheviks finally won a majority, turnout had dropped by 50%. So a growing block of people out there were not voting for any one party or another, they were voting for apathetic disillusionment.

The Bolsheviks were well poised to take advantage of this apathetic disillusionment first and foremost because they were the one thing on the menu standing against the forces that had caused all the apathetic disillusion. For example, they did excellent work organizing on shop floors of factories because the Menshevik led factory committees that had been set up around February all continued to advocate compromise and cooperation with the bosses and the liberals and the capitalists if for no other reason than we have to win the war, which they considered to be of paramount importance. But the workers on the shop floor did not agree with those priorities. They were very interested in what the Bolsheviks had to say, which was down with the bosses, down with the liberals, down with the capitalists and down with the war. And these were in fact the very workers that the Bolsheviks successfully armed during the Kornilov Affair: workers whose patience with Mensheviks, SRs, liberals, and the provisional government was completely exhausted.

The central figure in the Bolshevik transitionq from a militant minority faction to something like a popular political party was Leon Trotsky. More than anyone else, Trotsky was the public face of Bolshevism in the fall of 1917. Which is something of a surprise, given that he had broken with Lenin and the Bolsheviks way back during the original Bolshevik/Mensheviks split in 1903, and then the two sides had spent the last 15 years lobbing potshots at each other in various émigré newspapers. But Trotsky’s alienation from Lenin had always been far more personal than political. In terms of tactics, strategy, and objectives, Trotsky and his theory of permanent revolution neatly aligned with just about everything Lenin was saying. The reason he had fallen out with Lenin in the first place was because Lenin had been such a huge asshole to all of Trotsky’s friends back in 1903, and then a huge asshole to Trotsky himself in the wake of the Bolshevik/Menshevik split — though, to be sure, Trotsky gave absolutely as good as he got in these disputes, and painted his own portraits of Lenin with a brush dipped in poison.

But when everyone returned to Russia in 1917, both Trotsky and Lenin saw their interests align and they buried the hatchet. Both of them ultimately putting the political ahead of the personal. This was in marked contrast to another one of our old friends, Julius Martov. Ever since the beginning of World War I, Martov had led a leftwing Menshevik faction that was also very close to the Bolshevik position. And, here in 1917, these leftwing Mensheviks were absolutely defecting to the Bolsheviks in droves. But Martov himself couldn’t go there. He simply could not forgive Lenin’s naked opportunism, immorality, hypocrisy, and fundamental lack of political decency. Trotsky was ready to bury the hatchet; Martov was not, and he never would be.

But getting back to Trotsky, he was not even technically a member of the Bolshevik party when the July Days hit. When arrest warrants went out for the various Bolshevik leaders, Trotsky was not on the list. He had to actually write open letters to the authorities saying, hey, if you’re arresting Bolsheviks, you have to arrest me too, which, then they did. Having proven his loyalty, the Bolshevik central committee elected to bring Trotsky into the leadership while he was in prison, though it was hardly a unanimous vote. Trotsky was an arrogant egghead who had spent 15 years using his eggheaded arrogance against the Bolsheviks. Those old resentments were never going to disappear. Ever. But his talents were undeniable. And when he was released from jail shortly after the Kornilov Affair in the midst of the general rehabilitation of the Bolsheviks, he put all his undeniable talents at the service of the party. Because, as it turned out, Trotsky was not just a gifted writer, thinker, and polemicist, he was also a naturally magnetic orator. In September 1917 he absolutely became the face and voice of Bolshevism. Most people had frankly never seen or heard Lenin, who had been an anonymous émigré most of his life, and who excelled at dominating backroom committee meetings but not public rallies. Trotsky could dominate those public moments. It’s hard to gauge exactly how different things would have been in October 1917 had Trotsky remained aloof from the Bolsheviks, but it is worth always keeping in mind that when many, many, many of these workers and soldiers and sailors in Petrograd thought about the Bolsheviks, they pictured Trotsky, not Lenin.

With Trotsky now taking the public lead for the Bolsheviks even inside the Soviet, which he had been invited to join after returning to Russia, the right-leaning leadership really began to feel some heat. The Bolsheviks put forward a motion opposing any coalition government with bourgeois elements. And for the first time ever, a Bolshevik motion passed the Soviet. And this was not just thanks to Bolshevik votes alone, but also left SRs and left Mensheviks defecting from their former leaders and allies. The right leaning leadership who composed the executive council threatened to resign on September 9th if the motion was not rescinded — they, after all supported coalition government — but instead of falling into line, the general assembly simply confirmed the previous vote. The Soviet would not endorse coalition government. This led to the resignation of the leadership that had been in place since February, and a new slate of men stood poised to take over. Which is exactly what the Bolsheviks were aiming for.

Realizing the Soviets were moving decisively to the left, the right SRs and right Mensheviks, increasingly divorced from the left wings of their party, scrambled a response. They still believed in a rather literal and pedantic reading of historical materialism, which clearly required the bourgeois capitalist class to take the lead in the first democratic political revolution, which would pave the way for the second socialist revolution. What this meant is even though they were all socialists, they were ideologically committed to the idea of keeping bourgeois capitalists in the government. With Kerensky meanwhile looking for something, anything, to root his own political legitimacy in, they all hit on an idea. These leaders use the last gasp of their authority inside the Soviet to convene what was called the All Russian Democratic Conference. They invited representatives not just from the Soviets that had sprouted up throughout Russia, but also from various municipal Dumas, army committees, peasant co-op groups, and an institution we have not really heard much of since February, but which is still very much in existence, the zemstvos. By broadening the number of institutions represented, the right leaning socialists hoped to create a new kind of democratic consensus which was not exclusively rooted in the Soviet who would endorse coalition government between socialists and liberals.

This hastily convened meeting took place just two weeks after the Kornilov Affair, taking place in Petrograd between September 12th and September 14th. And it was, honestly, every bit the farce at the Kornilov Affair was. The right wing of the conference — and we’re talking here business leaders and industrialists liberals, and their allies — wanted to re-endorse a coalition government of socialists and Kadets. A center bloc wanted a mix of liberals and socialists, but they wanted to exclude the Kadets, many of whom had been implicated in the Kornilov Affair. And then there was a left bloc which included of course the Bolsheviks, who wanted an all socialist government which excluded the Kadets, excluded the liberals, excluded the capitalist classes, and rooted its legitimacy entirely in the Soviet. After a great deal of arguing and speechmaking, the left wound up finding itself in the minority, and the democratic conference approved the principle of a coalition government.

But then things got absurd as they narrowed down the specifics. An amendment was passed nearly unanimously that excluded from the government anyone associated with the Kornilov Affair. Okay, so far, so good. But then there was a second amendment on whether or not to exclude the Kadet Party in its entirety. When the vote was taken, the amendment passed. No member of the Kadet Party could be invited into the coalition government. This triggered howls of anger from the right, and so then, the whole package got voted on: the initial principle of a coalition plus the specific amendments. The left and right got together and voted the whole thing down. The left, because they were opposed to any coalition with the liberals, and the right, because they were angry at the exclusion of the Kadets. So, in the end, the democratic conference wrapped up having failed miserably. It simultaneously endorsed and rejected the idea of coalition government and broke apart having achieved exactly nothing.

As the democratic conference was flailing its way to nowhere, the presiding leadership of the right SRs and right Mensheviks got together with liberals and Kadets to just ignore the votes being taken in the conference. They formed their own extraordinary committee who created what came to be called the pre-parliament. The pre-parliament was a body that was supposed to provide a kind of temporary public assembly that could assert just enough sovereignty that Kerensky could say, well, until the constituent assembly meets, my government will be rooted in this institution called the pre-parliament — which again, they’re just making up on the fly right here. But even this utterly contrived formula collapsed. The Kadet Party now placed their own terms on coalition with the right leaning socialists. They said, the pre-parliament can certainly form, and can advise the government, but in no way will the government be answerable to it. And the right-leaning socialists were so desperate to get the liberals and Kadets to join with them that they agreed to these terms. And so, Alexander Kerensky began forming a coalition government that would reign until the constituent assembly, basically approved by no one and rooted in nothing.

This is the political context we need to keep in mind as we head into Red October. And the reason we spent so much time today talking about the nature of legitimacy and sovereignty is that clearly, by October 1917, there was just none of it to speak of. As we will discuss next week, Lenin, who is still off in Finland is now absolutely going out of his mind yelling at his comrades in the central committee that now is the time to strike, now, now, now, right now, we cannot wait. If we do it now, we’re going to win. All that we will be doing is overthrowing an illegitimate government that no one supports anyway. His comrades in the central committee were incredibly skeptical, but you know what?

Lenin wasn’t wrong.